The NISOA Executive Board met in Los Angeles, California from January 12, 2017 through January 14, 2017 to take on several challenges facing the organization.

The following members of the NISOA Executive Board attended:

John Puglisi, President

Julie Swarts, Executive Director

Todd Abraham, Sr. Director of Instruction

Don Wilbur, Sr. Director of Evaluation

Dan Lukash, Sr. Director of Programs

Bob Fischer, Secretary

Tom Richardson, Director of Awards and Membership

George Wescott, Past President

George Noujaim and Larry Dorsey from the National Referee Program staff attended the meetings.

Organizational Focus:

The focus of the meeting was to address two specific issues facing NISOA:

Deliver value to our membership by providing access to match assignments and a dues structure that delivers the maximum products and services at the lowest sustainable cost.

Continue to deliver and improve the training, insurance, materials provided by NISOA which reflect the unique instruction required for the collegiate game and the recognition by the NCAA/conferences of the value a NISOA training program brings to national/regional consistency and a reflection of the NCAA values.

We developed our goal statement for 2017 as:

NISOA will be the exclusive partner with conferences and the NCAA for training, certification and recruitment for their soccer match officials.

The program directors will align their goals and objectives for 2017 against this goal statement.

There was discussion about the desire, need and importance for conferences and the NCAA to officially recognize this relationship with NISOA. Several conference assignors sat in on meeting sessions and provided positive input regarding the partnership model. The model is that NISOA brings the NCAA message, core values and points of emphasis to the members through training and the conference supervisors (assignors) are responsible for training the officials about the conferences’ points of emphasis. We will establish an ad hoc committee to inventory and contact conference administrators/supervisor of officials to improve awareness of NISOA and enroll them as partners. Senior leaders will be reaching out to chapter leaders and others to recruit committee members.

The importance of immediately performing a dues structure review was discussed. There remains a perspective that since we are not paying the NCAA/Arbiter registration fee that current dues are too high.